The smell hit him first. It was a choking, suffocating cloud that clawed at his throat like sick fingers. Wet coal ash, spoiled trash, and something that smelled like metal and hurt his nose and made his tongue taste bad.
His body reacted violently to the air, which was so different from the clean, filtered air in his climate-controlled penthouse. His stomach started to spin.
Alexander tried to move. The concrete under him was rough, wet, and hard, and it hurt his hands as he pushed himself up. His muscles were stiff and painful, and they screamed in protest, as if he had been lying here for a long time.
His head hurt like crazy, and the world around him swam dangerously before snapping back into sharp, too-bright focus.
The logical part of his mind kept track of the facts: confusion, possible head injury, and muscle loss that happens when someone is unconscious for a long time. In a clinical setting. Easy to handle. A problem to fix.
After that, he opened his eyes wide and saw nothing.
He wasn't in his sleek Manhattan tower that looked out over the Hudson. He wasn't in a hospital, a basement, or anywhere else he knew. Instead, he lay on weathered cobblestones in what could only be called a nightmare of urban squalor: a narrow alley that looked like a wound between two tall brick walls.
The bricks were old and had been blackened by years of soot. In some places, where moisture caught the weak light, the surface looked almost iridescent. A thin strip of sky hung over the scene like a threat, filled with gray smoke that seemed to have become part of everything.
The heavy wool suit he had on, which had cost more than most people's monthly rent, was now completely ruined. Wet. Stained with things he didn't want to name. The stone was so hard that his leather shoes felt like torture devices.
The sound of iron-shod hooves hitting stone with rhythmic violence broke up his growing panic. Alexander's heart skipped a beat. He stumbled out of the alley's mouth, his legs shaking, and the world changed. The narrow canyon opened up to show a street that shouldn't be there.
There was complete chaos on the road.
Horse-drawn carts jammed every available inch, their wooden wheels churning through ankle-deep mud that looked more like liquid filth. Men in rough, coarse coats and dented bowler hats rushed by in what looked like organized chaos, shouting things that he couldn't understand in accents he half-recognized but couldn't quite place.
There was so much noise in the air that it felt like it was thick with it. There was a constant, roaring cacophony of business and industry, and the rhythmic, almost alive hiss of a distant steam engine made the ground shake beneath his feet.
His mind reached for explanations. A movie set? Some immersive historical recreation? A corporate retreat gone horribly wrong? None of them fit. There was an authenticity to the grime, the decay, the sheer reality of human suffering visible in every face that passed him that no production budget could manufacture.
He spotted a flickering gas lamp on a corner—actual flame contained in ornamental iron, casting dancing shadows across the brick—and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the damp air. His skin erupted in goosebumps. This wasn't a themed district in some gentrified neighborhood. This wasn't performance art or carefully curated nostalgia.
This was real.
He needed proof. Something concrete to anchor his fracturing reality. Scrambling to the nearest lamppost, he found a discarded newspaper clipping half-tucked beneath a grimy boot—probably dropped by one of the countless workers streaming past.
He unfolded the damp sheet with trembling fingers, rainwater smearing the ink, and forced himself to read past the initial blur in his vision.
The headline was set in heavy, antiquated lettering: LATEST DISPATCHES FROM THE DOCKS - SHIPPING DELAYS AND WORKER UNREST
TAMMANY'S GRIP TIGHTENS AS ELECTION NEARS
METROPOLIS EMBRACES NEW ILLUMINATION: BROADWAY GLOWS WITH ARC LAMPS
And below it, in smaller but no less definitive type: October 21, 1880
The newspaper fell from Alexander's fingers.
Time stopped. His legs felt hollow. The ground beneath him seemed to tilt at a sickening angle. One hundred and forty years. An impossible distance. Not just across space, but across the entire timeline of human civilization, ripped backward through time like a fish being yanked upstream.
The panic came then, time travel. Displacement. He had been torn from the 21st century, from his penthouse, his job as a CEO, his life, and dumped into the heart of the Gilded Age. Penniless. Alone. A ghost who wouldn't be born for more than a century.
His vision began to tunnel. His breathing came in sharp, rapid gasps that did nothing to fill his lungs with oxygen. This was it—the moment his mind finally fractured under the weight of the impossible.
Then, cutting through the roar of the city like a silver knife through cloth, came a sound that didn't belong. Ding.
A soft, clear tone that seemed to sound only in the chamber of his own mind, resonating behind his eyes and between his temples. Alexander blinked hard, convinced that stress and hypoxia had finally destroyed his sanity.
But something was materializing in front of him.
At first it was just a shimmer, like heat waves rising from summer pavement. Then it solidified, sharpening into definition with perfect, impossible precision. A rectangular display, glowing with a gentle, pale-blue luminescence that no one around him seemed to notice.
It hung in the air before his vision, completely translucent to the rest of the world yet vivid and tangible to him alone. A screen. An actual screen, floating in 1880 like some fever dream of sci-fi technology.
The text was crisp, perfectly rendered:
SYSTEM STATUS
User: Alexander Hamilton
Race: Human
System: Temporal Advancement Gacha (TAG)
System Current Resources: 0
Advancement Points (AP)
Inventory:
New User Package
Alexander stared. For a long moment, there was nothing but silence.
Then, slowly, his panic subsided, replaced by something else. Something colder. More familiar.
Skepticism. An isekai scenario. A cheat. A game mechanic applied to reality like some programmer's idea of divine humor. It was utterly ridiculous. It was also undeniably physically present.
He reached out with a trembling finger and touched the glowing New User Package icon.
The screen expanded, displaying its contents like a merchant unveiling wares:
NEW USER PACKAGE CONTENTS
Reward 1: 1 Bronze Gacha Ability Roll
Reward 2: 2 Bronze Gacha Skill Rolls
Reward 3: 3 Bronze Gacha Trait Rolls
Reward 4: 3 Bronze Gacha Item Rolls
Reward 5: Aristotle Template
"Aristotle?" Alexander muttered aloud. "What could this possibly help me with?"
SYSTEM: "Host, the Aristotle Template is now integrated. You are a Master Strategist, equipped with the Syllogistic Engine for flawless deduction and Prime Mover's Categories for instant systemic understanding. You will analyze, predict, and dismantle any challenge."
"Alright, alright," Alexander conceded, a fierce light entering his eyes. "So it's not entirely useless. Let's get to the gachas. Roll items first. Roll!"
SYSTEM: Rolling 3 Bronze Gacha Item Rolls...
ITEM ROLL RESULTS
Trash: 500 non-brand generic Cigarettes. Useful for taking the edge off.
Uncommon: Snake's Box. Metal Gear Solid, an unassuming box.
Trash: Bottle of Infinite Lotion. A simple bottle of slimy lotion that contains an infinite amount of lotion inside. Lotion must be squeezed out manually and trying to tamper with the bottle will simply break it. Adored by people like you.
"Nice, I can sell those—wait, 'people like me'?" Alexander snapped, his tone wounded. "I don't need any lotion!
Whatever. Give me the traits, system. Roll!"
SYSTEM: Rolling 3 Bronze Gacha Trait Rolls...
TRAIT ROLL RESULTS
Trash: Deus Eggs Machina. You will be able to find a regular chicken egg anywhere in opportune moments.
Uncommon: Pretty Privilege. You still look exactly the same—a perfectly mediocre 5/10—but due to a slight perceptual shift, you are now merely tolerable to a wider demographic. Enjoy being upgraded to a thoroughly underwhelming, yet "solid," 7/10. Your ugly mug won't scare the children anymore at least.
Uncommon: Silent Steps. You naturally walk silently and softly like an assassin or a cat.
"Thanks so much," Alexander spat, his voice laced with pure sarcasm, "Now I won't go hungry! Keep 'em coming!"
"My ability is my last hope, please!"
SYSTEM: Rolling 1 Bronze Gacha Ability Roll...
ABILITY ROLL RESULT
Rare: Lightning Channel. Allows you to channel lightning through any object you are holding, reinforcing and empowering them. This lightning imitates the object it is channeled through, becoming sharp with a sword and heavy with a hammer.
"Thank you, Gacha Gods! Hallelujah!" Alexander paused, feeling the thrill of power. "Wait, what's the difference between an ability and a skill?"
SYSTEM: "Host, Abilities are supernatural. Skills are not."
"Understood. Roll the skills."
SYSTEM: Rolling 2 Bronze Gacha Skill Rolls...
SKILL ROLL RESULTS
Rare: Intimidation. You are skilled at intimidating people, making them feel fear and shake in their boots with your mere presence. You instinctively know how to present yourself in ways that invoke terror.
Trash: Salt Distillation. You are skilled at extracting salt from sources of water or tears.
"Heh, I'm not gonna get mugged at all, nice!" Alexander closed the system window with a thought, and it dissolved like smoke.
He knew what to build first, the AC Dynamo. Alexander felt something inside him shift.The panic that had threatened to consume him moments before hardened into something else, purpose.
A slow, triumphant grin spread across his face, genuine and fierce in a way that would have frightened anyone watching. He stood straighter, shoulders rolling back, the fog of despair burning away like morning mist before a predatory sun.
1880 was before the War of the Currents. Edison's Direct Current was fighting tooth and nail against Westinghouse and Tesla's Alternating Current, a revolutionary but largely unproven technology that most of the industrial world viewed with suspicion and fear.
But he possessed knowledge of a modern, high-efficiency AC dynamo, or at least the idea of it. Technology that wouldn't exist, shouldn't exist, for decades. Something so far ahead of its time that it would be literally impossible to replicate, unless you were him.
He wasn't just stepping into the industrial revolution; he was walking in with the instruction manual already memorized.
The cold pavement and the stench of the alley faded into background static as his mind began to race, sketching out possible futures. Forget survival. Survival was guaranteed now. The real question, the only question that mattered, was what he would build with it. Who did he want to become?
Above him, the sky hung gray and threatening, but beyond it, in the direction of the river, he could just barely make out the skeletal framework of something massive under construction. The Brooklyn Bridge. Not yet complete. Not yet legend.
"I won't just participate in history," he whispered, the sound buried beneath the grinding roar of the city's endless machinery, heard by no one but himself. "I'm not going to survive this displacement. I'm going to exploit it."
His voice grew harder, colder, edged with an ambition that felt almost inhuman in its intensity. "I won't be a spectator. I won't be some ghost haunting the margins of the timeline. I'll be the architect. The visionary. The one who rewrites the rules."
He looked out across the smoke-choked horizon, at the thousands of workers and industrial machines, at the raw, untapped potential of an era about to explode into the modern world.
"I am Alexander Hamilton," he declared to the grimy bricks and the unknowing city, his voice low and fierce, burning with something that transcended mere determination. "And I will drag this world, kicking and screaming, into a new age. The age of my design. Humanity's real acceleration starts now—not when the twentieth century arrives, but right here. Right now. Under my terms. Just you wait."
Turns out this rich kid was a chuuni as well...
First, sell the cigars, he needed the money to survive.
Second, find respectable lodging. A boardinghouse in a decent neighborhood—somewhere far enough from the docks to avoid the criminal element, close enough to the industrial centers to make business connections.
Third, clean up. Lose the impossible suit, acquire clothing that didn't scream "foreign" to every person he passed. Learn to speak like he belonged here.
Fourth, secure a private, locked space where no one could observe his work. Somewhere safe. Somewhere where he could begin translating his future-tech into 1880 steel and copper.
When the industrial titans of this age finally reckoned with what he'd become, they would know that everything—everything—had changed. Because of him.
Alexander took one last breath of the foul, coal-tinged air, and smiled.
Then he walked forward into the chaos of 1880, ready to own it.
He navigated the muddy street with newfound purpose, ignoring the stares drawn by his ruined suit. A passing cart splattered his trousers with filth. Alexander didn't flinch. Filth was currency here; he'd wash it off later.
"Directions," he barked at a grizzled newsboy hawking damp papers. The boy eyed Alexander's stained finery with suspicion. "Decent pawn shop? Near the manufactories."
"Mrs. O'Leary's," the boy muttered, scared, "Two blocks west. Don't mention me if she asks."
Alexander tossed him a cigarette—one of the five hundred non-brand generics—and watched the boy's eyes widen. The thin cylinder vanished into a pocket faster than Alexander could blink. Small favors bought cheaply.